Fort, Keel, Co. Longford

Co. Longford |

Ringforts

Fort, Keel, Co. Longford

In a low-lying field in County Longford, a slightly raised patch of ground holds more history than its overgrown surface immediately suggests.

What looks from a distance like a scrubby knoll is in fact a rath, the remains of a roughly circular earthen enclosure of the kind that once served as a farmstead or defended residence throughout early medieval Ireland. This one measures approximately 36 metres east to west and 34 metres north to south, fashioned, it seems, from a natural knoll that was adapted and built upon rather than constructed entirely from scratch.

The structure still retains several of the features that define a well-preserved rath. A scarp, essentially a steep-sided earthen bank, rises to between two and two and a half metres, enclosing the raised interior. Beyond that runs a fosse, a defensive ditch roughly three metres wide and just over a metre deep, and beyond that again a wide, low outer bank. Together these concentric earthworks would have made the enclosure a formidable boundary in its day. By 1976, when the site was formally documented, the fosse and outer bank on the northern and south-eastern sides had already been levelled, probably through agricultural activity. The original entrance can still be read in the landscape, however: a depression in the scarp at the north-west, accompanied by a causeway crossing the fosse and a corresponding break in the outer bank, traces the line through which people once passed in and out.

The rath is now densely overgrown with scrub, which at once obscures and, in a way, protects it. The vegetation makes the earthworks difficult to read up close, but it also means the ground has not been further disturbed. For anyone with an eye for landscape, the geometry of the site becomes clearer from a slight distance, where the raised profile and the logic of its layered defences begin to resolve themselves out of the surrounding flat pasture.

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Pete F
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